Laura Poitras’s documentary Risk follows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the organization’s 2010 disclosures and the treatment of Chelsea Manning through Swedish authorities’ effort to extradite him from the United Kingdom in 2012. Assange claimed that transfer to Sweden could ultimately lead to extradition to the United States. The film documents his efforts to avoid capture, including his 2012 asylum claim and refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London, while presenting WikiLeaks’ publication model as a system that imposed major legal and personal risks on its staff and sources.
The film also became a record of internal and ethical disputes. After the 2016 Cannes screening, WikiLeaks supporter and security activist Jacob Appelbaum was publicly accused of abusing women; the source describes those allegations as allegations, not adjudicated findings. Poitras said Assange and his lawyers sought changes to scenes addressing sexual-assault accusations against him, and the producers later accused WikiLeaks of trying to censor or reshape the film. Risk’s 2017 re-cut shifted from a comparatively sympathetic portrait toward criticism of Assange’s conduct and responses to the accusations. Its reported box office was about $145,000, compared with approximately $3 million for Poitras’s Citizenfour, underscoring the documentary’s limited commercial reach despite its continuing relevance to platform accountability and activist-media ethics.
